Miscellaneous Musings, Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Image via Wikipedia

“If you don’t know what you believe, how do you know you believe it?”

That was a question posed to an adult Sunday school class by Rev Judd Wylie, back when I was still a Protestant in Texas. I’ve often thought that one of the wisest statements on faith I’ve ever heard and is probably one of the triggers that started me on the path to Rome. The other day, I came across this quote from the book Science and the Trinity, by John Polkinghorne, the English physicist turned Anglican priest.

“Broad general ideas are attractive (a divine Mind behind the order of the universe), but I believe that theism only becomes truly persuasive when it is elaborated in greater detail and when it is anchored in the experience and interpretation that are preserved and propagated within a religious tradition.”

I’ve known a few people in my time who profess faith in Christianity, yet refuse to participate in any kind of formal worship services or membership in any formal religious organization. They usually say they can worship God just as well on the golf course, or wherever, as I can in Church. I know then I’ve run across someone who has very little idea of what faith is, and cares less. Without some sort of definition to our beliefs, there simply is no belief.

The Desert Fathers, Sunday, May 29, 2011, St Cyril of Jerusalem

Image via Wikipedia

O strange and inconceivable thing! We did not really die, we were not really buried, we were not really crucified and raised again, but our imitation was but a figure, while our salvation is in reality. Christ was actually crucified, and actually buried, and truly rose again; and all these things have been vouchsafed to us, that we, by imitation communicating in His sufferings, might gain salvation in reality. O surpassing loving-kindness! Christ received the nails in His undefiled hands and feet, and endured anguish; while to me without suffering or toil, by the fellowship of His pain He vouchsafed salvation.

On the Christian Sacraments.

Founders Friday, Friday, May 27, 2011, Patrick Henry

Image by Marion Doss via Flickr

"It is when people forget God that tyrants forge their chains."

Miscellaneous Musings, Thursday, May 26, 2011

This is from a good column by Stephan White at The Catholic Thing.  To me, the most astonishing thing about the progressive movement is it's inability to learn from experience.  It's to sacrifice the good simply for the sake of ideology.

It’s an astonishing failure of political imagination (or an extraordinary act of historical hubris) to insist that the only moral means for promoting the common good are to be found in the expansion of the massive social assistance programs devised in the middle of the twentieth century, the costs of which have put this country on the road to insolvency.



If more taxes and government spending were in fact better for society, it would be irresponsible to oppose them. If a larger, more active state with an expansive welfare apparatus constituted the social arrangement most conducive to the common good, we would, at least from a Catholic point of view, be morally bound to support it. Yet as a matter of empirical evidence and prudential judgment, not ideological preference, the current system is, to say the least, not entirely convincing.

Wacky Wednesday, May 25, 2011, Barney Miller - Hash

It's Wednesday, we've made it half way through the week, it's time to relax and enjoy a laugh from the old Barney Miller TV show.

Miscellaneous Musings, Wednesday, May 25, 2011

This is certainly an interesting take on the current GOP presidential prospects, and I think William Kristol is right!

The Next President Isn’t Currently Running (Updated) The Weekly Standard

The Early Church Fathers, Sunday, May 22, 2011,Justin Martyr

We call this food Eucharist, and no one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true and who has been washed in the washing which is for the remission of sins and for regeneration [i.e., has received baptism] and is thereby living as Christ enjoined. For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these, but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus (First Apology 66 [A.D. 151]).